 Despite its deceptively generic title, NIGHTMARE is anything but a generic horror film. In fact, this is the horror film that fans who claim to be sick of Hollywood re-selling them the same old stories over and over again should be clamoring for.
But first, a caveat.
Writer/director Dylan Bank name-drops David Lynch early in the film, and Lynch's influence is obvious as the film careens from one plot twist to the next. Any fan of surreal storytelling and endings that defiantly refuse to wrap-up the film's events for the audience is in for a treat.
 While horror anthologies have fallen on hard times Stateside in last decade, with the very sporadic likes of TRAPPED ASHES relegated to the most limited big-screen play before heading to DVD, the format has flourished in Asia. The THREE movies, UNHOLY WOMEN and others bespeak Far East producers’ commitment to offering tasty samplers of different kinds of fear, and Thailand has now entered the fray with the cleverly monikered 4BIA, playing this week at the Philadelphia Film Festival.
 The Australian production DYING BREED proves that the survival-in-the-woods strain of horror film is anything but. The tried-and-true ingredients are present and accounted for: two young couples, a forbidding wilderness for them to venture into, weird and foreboding supporting characters, cannibalistic killers and plenty of graphic mayhem. And a little bit of based-on-reality garnish always adds an extra frisson, so the movie begins with a flashback involving the notorious Alexander Pearce, a.k.a. “The Pieman.” Back in the 19th century, when Australia served as a penal colony, Pearce escaped imprisonment on the island state of Tasmania and survived by consuming the flesh of his fellow escapees. He was recaptured and hanged for that offense…but could his bloodline have survived into the present day?
 Although it deals with the hot-button topics of religion and suicide, there’s never a sense that FROM WITHIN is aiming for gratuitous provocation, or wearing its issues on its sleeves. It’s a straightforward, back-to-basics horror drama that looks great—not surprising given that it was directed by the gifted cinematographer Phedon Papamichael. Yet he doesn’t let the imagery overwhelm the movie either, employing an eye-catching naturalistic palette that gracefully segues into menacing mood. Papamichael stated at the film’s Tribeca Film Festival premiere that horror isn’t necessarily his thing, but he proves here that he sure can direct the heck out of a scare setpiece.
 That niche of the horror genre focusing on inner-city terrors has been rife with real stinkers, to say the least. Roll on up to Blockbuster, where copies of VAMPIYAZ and ZOMBIEZ kick back in lounge chairs on the bottom of the video shelf deservedly collecting dust, and you’ll see what I mean. Leave it to Snoop Dogg to clean house and make amends for 2001’s BONES with HOOD OF HORROR, a vigorous and droll triumvirate of gore-drenched urban morality tales linked by a supernatural figure known as the Hound of Hell (played by you know who). Rather than attempt to slip Snoop into a new, untried skin à la BONES, HOOD embraces his pop-culture personality without reserve, “Snoop speak” and all—but that’s just an added bizzle, er, bonus to what makes the film work.
 With a screenplay credited to Karim (SUBCONSCIOUS CRUELTY) Hussain, Richard (HARDWARE) Stanley and Nacho (AFTERMATH) Cerdà, and direction by Cerdà himself (making his long-awaited feature debut), you might expect THE ABANDONED to be some transgressive cinematic act of war, two hours of mind-twisting, boundary-smashing, subversive content that pushes the envelope until the screen actually bleeds.
 Those who come to THE GRAVEDANCERS expecting the off-the-wall, black-humored insanity of director Mike Mendez’s previous THE CONVENT should be advised: This is a much more straightforward supernatural tale. Which is not to say that Mendez has mellowed, just that here he’s tackling material (a script by Brad Keene and Chris Skinner) which largely takes its horrors seriously. And the energy of his filmmaking hasn’t waned; back when he first announced the project, Mendez compared it to an adult version of the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, and once it gets cooking, THE GRAVEDANCERS does indeed play like a cinematic amusement-park spook ride. Without self-consciously homaging the films of decades ago, it harks back to the days when horror movies had fun scaring you, yet didn’t wink at the camera or employ self-conscious humor to do so.
 Ever since it took off three decades ago with the likes of HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH, the teen-slasher subgenre has been an unstoppable force in horror cinema. These films are a pleasure for certain scream fans and regular Friday-night moviegoers alike—and not a guilty one, despite what they’ve become. The youth-stalker flicks of today have become formulaic and largely substance-free, with the same group of annoying characters being (thankfully) killed off in pretty much the same order under the same circumstances.
 UNREST, directed by Jason Todd Ipson and released as part of the After Dark Horrorfest, proceeds from a pairing of subgenre and location—a ghost story set in a hospital morgue—so appropriate to each other that it’s surprising they haven’t been combined more often before. In addition to plenty of opportunities for stark, spare atmosphere and nasty bits involving cadavers, the mix allows Ipson, who scripted with Chris Billett, to throw in occasional musings about the relationship between the dead and the living and how those who deal directly with the deceased—in this case, medical students—handle that interaction. The result is a thoughtful and spooky little movie that stands apart from the formulas that bind so many horror films in both the studio and independent fields.
 The end credits of PENNY DREADFUL (part of After Dark Horrorfest) state that the movie is “© 2005 Dreadful Films.” Must…not…make…obvious…joke. Actually, I have to be fair and say that this isn’t a dreadful film, just a quite problematic one—starting with the fact that the title is rather misleading. The storyline has nothing to do with the Victorian-era “penny dreadful” pulp tales; it is about a girl named Penny, but she isn’t dreadful, though dreadful things do happen to her.
 Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A gaggle of fresh-faced young people drive deep into previously uncharted areas of the country, and wind up in a backwoods abode populated by a freakish, inbred clan of cannibalistic psychopaths. Sound familiar? It should. It’s the basic plot outline of more than half of the non-supernatural genre output since Tobe Hooper first fired up his rusty McCulloch back in 1974 with his classic and often-imitated (and remade!) THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.
 THE DEATHS OF IAN STONE (part of 2007’s After Dark Horrorfest II) begins unpromisingly, joining its title character (played by Mike Vogel) in the midst of a hockey game, with pounding music and lots of fast cuts that seem to earmark this as just another flashy, trendy youth film. A little later, after Ian has suffered the first of his many demises, he spots a sinister character whose head vibrates in that JACOB’S LADDER manner which suggests the movie will end with a familiar, predictable twist. Rest assured: It doesn’t, and it’s a little more thoughtful than that flashy opener would indicate as well. Stan Winston’s latest venture as a producer doesn’t fully satisfy in the end, but it’s a diverting enough alternative to the torture and slasher flicks currently flowing out of the off-Hollywood horror scene.
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ALIEN TRESPASS is a somewhat misleading title, in that it suggests a type of transgression when the film itself is, for want of a better word, as polite as a movie can be. It means to be a homage to B-monster flicks of the ’50s, a time when low-budget genre fare was far kinder and gentler than it is today. And in that it succeeds—but that’s all it succeeds at.
